The Peabody Awards

#MoreThanMean-Women in Sports ‘Face’ Harassment (Youtube)

#MoreThanMean takes a common device from late night television—the reading of “mean tweets”—and uses it to expose the angry, hateful bile that female sportscasters are subject to simply for doing their jobs. A moving attack on misogynistic troll culture, the video’s simple message about civility online is painfully conveyed by the damage the vicious tweets do not only to the women forced to hear them, but also to the unsuspecting men who read them face-to-face with the female reporters and who are literally confronted with the immediacy of violence and sexism. Their faces register utter embarrassment for men, and for humans more generally. #MoreThanMean is an extremely powerful four minutes made for $300 yet shared globally, and encourages both an end to silence around abuse of women in sports journalism and a reflection on the toxic treatment of women online more generally. Proving that media can be as impactful in shaping public discourse when they are short and low-budget as when they are epic and sweeping, #MoreThanMean earns a Peabody Award.